Germany's president Friday marked 70 years since a meeting that unleashed the Nazis' mass extermination of Jews, pledging to do everything to thwart "murderous hatred" of foreigners in the country.
Christian Wulff was addressing an event to mark the conference at a villa on the Wannsee lake on the outskirts of Berlin where senior Nazis adopted the "final solution" in January 1942.
Referring to the plan to exterminate all Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe as "this darkest chapter of German history", Wulff said the site, which opened as a museum in 1992, was "a place of German shame".
"This place and the name Wannsee have become a symbol for the bureaucratically organized distinction between life that is worth living and that which is not...," Wulff said, according to a text of his speech.
He said it was "important and a national task" to never forget that this "unbelievable and inconceivable" mass killing of Jews had occurred.
Wulff also referred to the recent discovery of a neo-Nazi gang believed to have been behind the unsolved murders of 10 people, mainly shopkeepers of Turkish origin, between 2000 and 2007.
"We are filled with shame and rage," he said, calling for those who supported and helped the group to be found and brought to justice, networks destroyed and for light to be shed on the facts.
And he promised the victims' families that: "We will do everything so that terror and murderous hatred for foreigners and the unknown never again have a place in Germany."
Fifteen senior Nazis under the leadership of Reinhard Heydrich took part in the Wannsee conference, including Adolf Eichmann, who was a key organiser in the deportation and murder of millions of Jews and others during World War II.